Abstract A growing literature has examined how international organizations (IOs) use narratives for self-legitimation—legitimation aimed not at external audiences but IO staff themselves. However, little work examines why some self-legitimation ‘stick’ and others fade away or are challenged by counter-narratives. I address this question focusing on the content of narratives. First, describe lif...

Media professionals – such as news editors, image researchers, and documentary filmmakers increasingly rely on online access to digital content within audiovisual archives to create narratives. Retrieving audiovisual sources therefore requires an in-depth knowledge of how to find sources digitally. These storytelling practices intertwine search technologies with the user’s ideas and production ...

We explain how organizational experiences that fall outside already known experience categories pose a challenge to traditional notions of learning. We suggest that one way to learn about and from such unusual experiences is through the use of narratives. Not only do narratives help individuals make sense of unusual experiences, but, at the same time, they facilitate a process whereby others ca...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of culture on the creative and stylistic features children employ when producing narratives based on wordless picture books. METHOD Participants included 60 first- and second-grade African American, Latino American, and Caucasian children. A subset of narratives based on wordless picture books collected as part of a larger study was...

This study investigated the possible pragmatic change concerning the narrative production of older adults. Brazilian young and older adults residing in Porto Alegre/BR were instructed to tell personal and fictitious stories. Propositions of their discourse were analyzed in terms of relevance, subjectivity and repetition. Older adults presented a greater proportion of indirectly relevant proposi...

Several scholarly trends, such as narrative medicine, patient-centered and relationship-centered care, have long advocated for the value of the patient's voice in the practice of medicine. As theories of textual analysis are applied to the understanding of stories of illness, doctors and scholars have the opportunity to develop more nuanced and multifaceted appreciation for these accounts. We r...

Institutional change has a human face. This paper explores how a select group of women in China and India experienced economic and political turmoil and why they chose to become change agents. Through in-depth interviews with 40 women from NGOs, government agencies and private business, four broad moments in the evolution of a change agent are identified and discussed: (1) awareness of a double...

After an introductory course in experiential-integrative psychotherapy, 21 graduate students provided personal narratives of their experiences, which were analyzed using the grounded theory method. Results produced 37 hierarchically organized experiences, revealing that students perceived multiple changes in both professional (i.e., skill acquisition and learning related to the therapeutic proc...

Purpose of the paper and literature addressed: The aim of the paper is to polish the use of qualitative methods in inter-organizational research by discussing how narrative approach can be applied into interorganizational research. The paper relies the key literature related to narratives: narrative cognition (Bruner 1986), narrative interviewing (Mishler 1986, Flick 2004), data gathering and a...